Can you ask patients for Google reviews? Where AHPRA draws the line

Your patients are free to post whatever they like about you on Google. They are members of the public writing on a platform you do not own and cannot control. Your Google Business Profile carrying those reviews is not you advertising, and you are not expected to police them or take them down.

Your advertising is a different thing entirely. Your website, your Google Ads, your Meta ads, your social posts, your printed material, the wall of the waiting room. Anything you publish to promote a regulated health service sits under Section 133 of the National Law, which prohibits testimonials about the clinical aspects of that service.

A testimonial, in AHPRA's framing, is a recommendation or a positive statement about the clinical side of the service, made by someone who received it. The line is what the statement is about, not who wrote it or where it first appeared.

So the question is never whether the review exists. It is whether you have picked it up and used it to promote yourself.

Leaving a glowing review where the patient posted it is fine. Pasting the same sentence onto your home page, into an ad headline, or over the top of a social tile is the moment it becomes a testimonial in your advertising. It does not matter that it is genuine, that they wrote it unprompted, or that it was public before you touched it.

The nuance worth holding on to is that not every review is about clinical care. A comment about reception, parking, how easy the booking was, or how well someone explained things is describing the experience, not the treatment. Those sit outside the testimonial line. Read the whole quote before you use one, though. A single sentence about pain easing drags the rest of it across.

You can ask patients for a Google review. Nothing prohibits it, and for local search it is one of the more useful things a clinic can do. What you cannot do is shape the outcome.

Ask everyone, not only the patients you expect to be pleased. Inviting the happy ones and skipping the rest is the part that reads as gaming a review platform, and it is your conduct rather than the patient's.

Never offer anything in return. A discount, a voucher, an entry into a draw, an extra service thrown in. The moment there is an inducement, the opinion is something you paid for.

Never write it for them, and never edit what they send you first. Suggested wording, a template, a helpful draft to make it easier. Once you have shaped the words, they are your words, and your words about your own clinical care are advertising.

The review sits outside your control. Your reply does not. Anything you write underneath is published by you, about a regulated health service, which puts it inside the same rules.

There is a second issue underneath that one. A reply that names someone's treatment, thanks them for their progress, or even says it was lovely to see them, confirms that person was a patient. They may have chosen to disclose that themselves. Confirming it is still your disclosure, on a public page, about someone else's health.

The safe reply is short, warm and non clinical. Thank them for the feedback. Do not name the treatment, do not comment on how they are doing, and do not confirm or deny that they were ever seen. The same shape works for a negative review, where the temptation to correct the record is much stronger and the risk is much higher.

None of this means your reviews are wasted. They are doing real work where they sit, and there are several ways to get value from them without lifting a single sentence into your advertising.